There were no other relevant associations with hippocampal volume. Our findings do not support the idea that mental demands at work protect cognitive health via hippocampal volume or brain volume. Further research may clarify through what mechanism mentally demanding activities influence specifically dementia pathology in the brain.Objective Growing evidence suggests that sleep disturbance is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). https://www.selleckchem.com/products/bovine-serum-albumin.html Amyloid-β (Aβ) deposition in the brain is a main pathophysiology of AD. Considering that peripheral Aβ level is associated with brain Aβ deposition, the present study investigated the relationship between sleep disturbance and plasma Aβ levels. Methods This is a population-based cross-sectional study. A total of 1,459 participants from a village in the suburbs of Xi'an, China, were enrolled from January 3, 2017 to March 26, 2017. Sleep quality was assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), and a PSQI score of 10 points as poor sleep quality. Cognitive function was assessed with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Fasting venous blood was taken in the morning, and the plasma Aβ levels were measured using ELISA. The relationships between plasma Aβ levels and sleep quality were analyzed using multiple linear regression. Results Among the participants, 231 had poor sleep quality (15.83%). The log-transformed Aβ40 level had significant differences among the different sleep groups (F = 3.216, p = 0.040). The log-transformed Aβ40 level was higher in the poor sleep quality group than that in the general sleep quality group [87.17 (73.42, 107.34) vs. 89.69 (74.81, 125.79) pg/ml, p = 0.016]. In bivariate analysis, sleep quality was negatively associated with the log-transformed plasma Aβ40 level (β = -0.025, p = 0.011). Conclusion In the community population, poorer sleep quality is associated with a higher plasma Aβ40 level. This indicated that sleep disturbance might also involve in dysfunction of peripheral Aβ clearance.Lower serum vitamin D has been reported to be associated with stroke. This study aimed to analyze the risk factors of vitamin deficiency in Chinese stroke patients, and further analyze its impact in different gender and their clinical variables.
982 stroke patients were enrolled. Laboratory parameters such as serum vitamin D, apolipoprotein A-I (ApoA-I), apolipoprotein B (ApoB), ApoA-I/ApoB, cholesterol (CH), fibrinogen (FIB), blood glucose (Glu), high-density lipoprotein (HDL), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and triglyceride (TG) were collected and recorded. The severity of stroke was assessed by National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score. Based on their serum vitamin D level, patients were divided into three groups Vitamin D deficiency (&lt;50 nmol/L), vitamin D insufficiency (?50-75 nmol/L) and vitamin D sufficiency (?75 nmol/L) and differences were compared among the three groups. Statistical analyses were done to assess the risk factors for serum vitamin D deficiency in ourk factors for vitamin D deficiency in our incident stroke patients. NIHSS was more sensitive to vitamin D deficiency in male ischemic stroke patients. Besides, under higher FIB circumstance, the increasing NIHSS score was more related to the vitamin D deficiency. Levels of vitamin D in patients with ischemic stroke should be well monitored during the disease cascade.This paper uses a discourse task to explore aspects of semantic production in persons with various degree of cognitive impairment and healthy controls. The purpose of the study was to test if an in-depth semantic analysis of a cognitive-linguistic challenging discourse task could differentiate persons with a cognitive decline from those with a stable cognitive impairment. Both quantitative measures of semantic ability, using tests of oral lexical retrieval, and qualitative analysis of a narrative were used to detect semantic difficulties. Besides group comparisons a classification experiment was performed to investigate if the discourse features could be used to improve classification of the participants who had a stable cognitive impairment from those who had cognitively declined. In sum, both types of assessment methods captured difficulties between the groups, but tests of oral lexical retrieval most successfully differentiated between the cognitively stable and the cognitively declined group. Discourse features improved classification accuracy and the best combination of features discriminated between participants with a stable cognitive impairment and those who had cognitively declined with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.93.Healthy aging is usually accompanied by changes in the functional modular organization of the human brain, which may result in the decline of cognition and underlying brain dysfunction. However, the relationship between age-related brain functional modular structure differences and cognition remain debatable. In this study, we investigated the age-associated differences of modules and hubs from young, middle and old age groups, using resting-state fMRI data from a large cross-sectional adulthood sample. We first divided the subjects into three age groups and constructed an individual-level network for each subject. Subsequently, a module-guided group-level network construction method was applied to form a weighted network for each group from which functional modules were detected. The intra- and inter-modular connectivities were observed negatively correlated with age. According to the detected modules, we found the number of connector hubs in the young group was more than middle-age and old group, while the quantity of provincial hubs in middle-age group was discovered more than other two groups. Further ROI-wise analysis shows that different hubs have distinct age-associated trajectories of intra- and inter-modular connections, which suggests the different types of topological role transitions in functional networks across age groups. Our results indicated an inverse association between functional segregation/integration with age, which demonstrated age-associated differences in communication effeciency. This study provides a new perspective and useful information to better understand the normal aging of brain networks.